Longlisted for The Millions Best Translated Book Awards for Fiction
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

Four siblings. Two summer houses. One terrible secret.

When a dispute over her parents' will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favouritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different-a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured.

Will and Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman's struggle to survive and be believed. Vigdis Hjorth's novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway and has been translated into twenty languages.

Vigdis Hjorth was born in 1959. She grew up in Oslo and has lived in Copenhagen, Bergen, Switzerland and France. She is the author of a over a dozen novels. She has won numerous liteary awards in Scandinavia, including the Dobloug Prize in 2018 and the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature on two occasions.

Four siblings. Two summer houses. One terrible secret. To what degree should the horrors of the past be allowed to shake the present? Stalked by the darkest of shadows from her childhood, a woman struggles against the tide dragging her back to the family she fled years ago. This emotionally searing novel is at once a wrenching look at a family fractured and a meditation on the nature of trauma and memory.